Southwest Airlines arrived at Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport in March 2011 amid great fanfare. At the same time, it launched service to Charleston.
A lack of direct flights, high ticket prices and customers seeking travel relief at airports in Charlotte and Atlanta were among the reasons for the local optimism – and excitement.
Things didn’t go as planned, however. The airline has reduced its GSP schedule from an initial seven flights to three, and now it only flies to Atlanta.
Dave Ridley, former Southwest senior vice president and chief marketing officer, was part of the airline’s inner circle of executives who planned and executed the GSP service.
He was in town recently to talk to Endeavor’s Collaborators & Cocktails series about leadership and service excellence. Endeavor is a membership-based co-working community for independent companies and freelancers in the creative services field.
Before his speech, Ridley, a 63-year-old senior advisor to Southwest’s CEO, sat down to talk about Southwest’s decision to fly to Greenville – and how the airline would not have come to GSP if its May 2011 acquisition of AirTran had occurred earlier.
You were involved in the airline’s very early planning stages for Greenville and several folks in Greenville and several organizations lobbied you heavily. What tipped the scales for Greenville?
I was introduced to the Upstate in 2002 or 2003 when my second daughter went to Furman [University] and soon thereafter my elder daughter moved to Greenville. So in 2003, ’04 and ’05 I started coming over here. I became intrigued with the Upstate economy and the beauty and all the attraction.
I began having discussions with our planning department about using Greenville as a classic alternative airport that Southwest had built their system from 1971 around, whether it was Houston Hobby or Dallas Love Field or Burbank or Chicago Midway. Through the first 30 years of Southwest, that would be 1971 through 2001, we generally avoided hubs – Chicago O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, even Charlotte. It was part of our strategy to do so.
When I got a sense of the Upstate economy – look at a map and you’re sitting here between Atlanta and Charlotte – and then being introduced to the GSP airport folks, they gave me all the stats about traffic being drawn away because of the high fares in Greenville. Hearing the horror stories from new acquaintances about getting stuck on the last flight of the day in Charlotte or Atlanta, the commuter flight that comes in and they cancel it and you have rent a car to get back on home that night, I was an advocate of Greenville as an alternative airport.
If you colored the states in which we had a presence, there was a big gap in Georgia and South Carolina. There was no Southwest presence. We were in Alabama. We were in Tennessee. We were in Raleigh-Durham. But Georgia and South Carolina – there’s nothing there.
Would you have come to Greenville had you known you were going to buy AirTran (whose principal hub was Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport)?
We would not have. It’s a story that I’ve shared with Dave Edwards (GSP president and CEO). Dave Edwards and I were actually comrades in arms back in ’06, ’07, ’08, ’09, ’10, trying to make Greenville happen. We were thrilled – I was because I thought it was a good thing for Southwest, a good strategy for Southwest to get in here.
I was an advocate inside Southwest, but not so foolish an advocate to do it for my benefit. I understood what was happening up here. But it clearly was driven by the alternative airport strategy to draw people from northern Atlanta and Athens and Charlotte and Asheville and have them come this way instead of driving to Atlanta and Charlotte.
We didn’t look for a subsidy. It was not a quid-pro-quo. It was wonderful evidence of community support. And it was impressive. They [Greenville civic and business leaders] did a really good job selling Southwest on this honorarium, on the support. We came in with seven flights a day and we actually did fine. The tipping point [for Greenville changes] was the AirTran acquisition.
Now, you have three flights a day to Atlanta. Will that change?
I can’t predict the future. We have struggled to try to figure out how to make Greenville work, and believe me I looked at Greenville’s numbers all the time because I want it to work. Once the impact of having our own low-fare brand in Charlotte and Atlanta [occurred], we just stopped drawing the number of bodies in Greenville.
Our network planning people are the ones who came up with this idea, not just for Greenville, but for other small cities that we had acquired from AirTran and had kept open. We’re going to go to, in effect, almost a hub strategy because we’ve built up in Atlanta. I think it’s doing OK. I have it on great authority that there’s no “Oh, gosh, Greenville is on the chopping block.”
Why is Charleston successful for Southwest?
Because Charleston has a brand on the East Coast. And it has a brand somewhat west of the Mississippi River. Greenville does not. Charleston always had the leisure. Now they’ve got Boeing and a lot of technology things are happening down there. Boston, New York, Baltimore – they know Charleston.
Greenville has tried to build just basically on the business side. And that’s important for air travel. The business traveler is very important. But that leisure travel component tops things off. Greenville still has not created that brand outside this area.
